Worked with an e-commerce dept for a short time, about... wow, 17 years ago (lol), and the I believe the loop was closing then. I was with a fortune 500 company and our pages were specifically designed to match prospective client searches, which careful research had shown to use particular word combinations. Over a relatively short period of time, the pages dropped off front results of the major search engines (Yahoo et al were still significant contenders)... and we were being heavily solicited for advertising.
The business leaders attempted to combat the obvious mafia-like extortion by following the rules, which predictably failed, but then rather than supporting the grift directly, threw in with consolidators that were already paying for advertising, and grouped our product listings with competitors (think 'price-shopping' sites as an analogy). It was slimy but essentially the same model as freight/import-export consolidators, who 'expedite' in ways the source companies would likely get in deep trouble were they to attempt.
At around a similar time-frame, maybe a bit earlier.. the domain registrars were booming because people wanted their own domains. It was the pre-consolidation era before all those little sites died off one by one and went to places like geocities, livejournal, myspace, fb and related.
So the registrars all had web-based tools to do record lookups on contact info, business reg against domains and so, the basic whois records. Plus you could check to see if a domain was available, with the option of hosting it with them.. which they obviously wanted as a followup & ongoing piece of business. Well some anons found that this registrar was quietly registering domains that didn't exist before they were queried.. so amazing, you could then buy it from them!
All algorithmic of course.. so I wouldn't be at all surprised if people wrote some scripts which iteratively try to query all possible 3 letter domains, then all 4 letter domains, then all 5 letter domains..
Shady stuff was always part of the picture even among the 'respectable' names. Of course, its essentially an open secret now that the worst online crime is fb/google/twitter/youtube, but then it was just less spoken of.
Worked with an e-commerce dept for a short time, about... wow, 17 years ago (lol), and the I believe the loop was closing then. I was with a fortune 500 company and our pages were specifically designed to match prospective client searches, which careful research had shown to use particular word combinations. Over a relatively short period of time, the pages dropped off front results of the major search engines (Yahoo et al were still significant contenders)... and we were being heavily solicited for advertising.
The business leaders attempted to combat the obvious mafia-like extortion by following the rules, which predictably failed, but then rather than supporting the grift directly, threw in with consolidators that were already paying for advertising, and grouped our product listings with competitors (think 'price-shopping' sites as an analogy). It was slimy but essentially the same model as freight/import-export consolidators, who 'expedite' in ways the source companies would likely get in deep trouble were they to attempt.
At around a similar time-frame, maybe a bit earlier.. the domain registrars were booming because people wanted their own domains. It was the pre-consolidation era before all those little sites died off one by one and went to places like geocities, livejournal, myspace, fb and related.
So the registrars all had web-based tools to do record lookups on contact info, business reg against domains and so, the basic whois records. Plus you could check to see if a domain was available, with the option of hosting it with them.. which they obviously wanted as a followup & ongoing piece of business. Well some anons found that this registrar was quietly registering domains that didn't exist before they were queried.. so amazing, you could then buy it from them!
All algorithmic of course.. so I wouldn't be at all surprised if people wrote some scripts which iteratively try to query all possible 3 letter domains, then all 4 letter domains, then all 5 letter domains..
Shady stuff was always part of the picture even among the 'respectable' names. Of course, its essentially an open secret now that the worst online crime is fb/google/twitter/youtube, but then it was just less spoken of.